Blue Origin has entered the race to send data centers into space, with a new application to the Federal Communications Commission requesting permission to launch more than 50,000 satellites into orbit.
In the March 19 FCC filing, the space tech company, owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, outlined its “Project Sunrise” initiative as a means to address mounting demand for AI compute while reducing the high water and energy needs typically seen at terrestrial sites.
The project would complement the company’s TeraWave network. Plans for this 5,408-satellite constellation were first revealed in January, pitched as a network to deliver ultra-high-speed connectivity between satellites, ground stations and customers.
“The societal benefits of AI are fundamentally constrained by the availability and affordability of the computing infrastructure that powers it,” the company said in its filing. “Space-based data centers can help break this bottleneck.”
According to the filing, the satellites would operate in circular “sun-synchronous” orbits at altitudes between 500 and 1,800 kilometers, enabling continuous access to solar power and removing the need for electrical grids and water-intensive cooling systems.
“The built-in efficiencies of solar-powered satellites, continuous access to solar energy, and the absence of land and grid constraints could significantly lower the marginal cost of compute compared to terrestrial alternatives,” the company added.
While the filing did not detail the scale of computing power the satellites would deliver, the project is positioned as serving the public interest by enabling scalable computing infrastructure to support “economic competitiveness, technological innovation, and broad societal benefit.”
With AI compute demands anticipated to keep rising alongside industries’ increased rollout of the tech, interest in space as the new frontier of infrastructure deployment has been on the rise in recent years.
In January, Elon Musk’s SpaceX reportedly sought FCC approval to deploy up to one million satellites to help meet accelerating AI compute demand.
Other companies, including Google, Axiom Space and Aetherflux have also expressed interest in launching their data centers into space.